Isle of the Echoing Hulls
by minkspit
Summary: A corsair stops to tell a story in a tavern. Everything is true, including the parts that aren't. *Now with an interlude containing even more honest lies and alcohol.
1. Chapter 1

"Now, this story happened a while back, but that doesn't make it a lie. I swear on my tattooed tail and me mother's grave—and yes, she's in there; I've checked—that every last bit of it is true. So stop your snorin' into your mugs of ale and perk up what bits you've got left of your ears and listen.

All of this took place when I was still a new sailor onboard _The Malverous. _I was a stocky ratling who'd just gotten off the mainland and didn't know a bloody thing. I'd found my sea legs and I'd spent three salt-crusted years workin' the ship, but I was still wet behind the ears compared to some of the beasts in my crew.

One late fall, we got blown far north. We were tryin' to get away from other corsair ships dartin' about that had been givin' us problems, our sails were shot, and half of us were sick. It was only a mean cold n' something stirrin' in our bellies, but the Captain didn't want to risk runnin' us ragged while we were already down and make us liable to catchin' something worse. So he told crow's nest to keep a lookout for the first island he saw to make land at.

We sailed five more miserable hours in a mist and were retchin' over the sides when crow's nest called land ho and said there was a small island comin' up on our starboard side. There was a rocky cliff along the north part of it that kept us from gettin' too close, but the south side looked clear, and in a few rig changes and a turn of the rudder, we headed straight for the island. Everyone who wasn't moanin' belowdeck flooded up to take a look at where we would be anchorin'.

But something was off. The island looked lumpy. None of us could make out much from the mist, but the island's sides looked oddly round and smooth to be matchin' the jagged rocks it was set by. A tangle of something was draped over the rocks, but none of us could tell what it was. Even the sharpest-eyed beast onboard with a spyglass couldn't make it out, but he suggested it was big fishin' net. We all knew that was wrong, too; with all the rocky sea floors and glaciers around, some of which we'd hit that were as big as a cottage, no beast was goin' to fish in these waters.

The closer we got to the island, the more of it slowly peeled out of the mist, and the more rounded rocks started appearin'. Stripes ran down the side of nearest ones, others were splintered all to hell, cracks of sunlight were shinin' beneath some of the biggest boulders onshore, and then we realized what they were.

Ships. The entire island was made of ships. They had been turned over hull-up and heaped together like flotsam washed on a beach. And I don't mean that they were tipped over. I mean they were _flipped._ They had been rolled hull up in the water with not a mast in sight between all of them but one, a splintered and broken mainstay shoved between two ships with its torn rigging still hanging off of it. That was what the spyglass beast had mistaken for the fishing net. Then fog began to clear aside, and we saw _all_ of them. Hundreds and hundreds of flipped ships, some of them piled sky high to make the rocks we had spotted, and others only a few feet below the water.

We sailed over a few of them, barely bumpin' our own hulls to their overturned bellies. Some of them were small fishing dinghies stacked in cracked piles. Others were much bigger. _The Malverous_ was a sturdy schooner, but some of those ships I saw belly-up could have given her a run for it on the high seas, and a few could have crushed her completely. Worse, some of those ships had holes ripped in them from deck to keel. Jagged, ripped holes that let ye see clean through the sides down into the pulverized remains of the decks below, even though there was nothing left in them after the water had its way with their innards.

When they first saw the ships, the crew started panicking, but when they saw the holes ripped in the sides that ye'd usually only see after a blackfish got its teeth into something—but ten times bigger—they almost had a damn mutiny. This island had the stench of Vupuz all over it and they'd rather rut on a bottle filled with salted rum and broken glass then set foot on it, o' even _near_ it. But there was nothing we could do. None of the crew were in good shape to go haulin' over the rough north seas, and we needed to set in somewhere for a night. The Captain had us anchor in a cove made of broken ships and said that if anyone wanted to go hull-hoppin' and head ashore, they could, but their hides were their own damn problem.

In the end, it was me, Tagrol the sea otter, and Yelkis the fox who decided to go ashore. Tagrol was a swaggerin' waterdog with gold hoops in his ears who'd come out of Southsward's ports after bein' disowned five different ways to hellgates from his family up there, and he'd turned to piratin' to fill his pockets. S'far as otters went, he was just as lively and rough as the rest of them, and ye could trust him to be the one of the first startin' a brawl o' jumpin' overboard on a line to board an enemy ship.

Yelkis, he was different. If Tagrol was all bawdy laughter and jumpin' headfirst into crowds, then Yelkis was doublecheckin' everything and shrewdly makin' sure the crowd was worth jumpin' in before he did. But that didn't make him any less bold; it just made him more likely to go testin' waters before he dove in headfirst. Yelkis was a red fox from the Juska coasts with a yellow streak down his back he pretended didn't exist, but Tagrol and I tolerated it as long as it didn't show up in a fight.

Then, of course, there was me. But I don't feel like goin' on a spiel about myself, so ye can feel free to ask any other corsairs with green serpents tattooed on their left arms about Laikan, and they'll let you know.

Yelkis, Tagrol, and I were the youngest, and we oft headed out to do things the rest of the older crew thought were reckless and plain fikkin' dumb. We were the stupidest and the bravest—and we were the sickest. It didn't matter if the older sailors were grumblin' about the knobby hulls the lookout saw on the other side of the island and how warped wood on a ship meant bad spirits; Yelkis said he was goin' to start pukin' out chains of his intestines if we stood on our ship one more minute, and Tagrol and I agreed.

We gathered some supplies and our weapons, said goodbye to our retchin' and listless crewmates layin' in their hammocks like dead fish, and climbed down the sides of our ship. We jumped from half-sunk hull to half-sunk hull until we made it ashore and then we set out to find a place to camp. The whole beach was made of rottin' wood. All the shelter we could find was either flipped smaller boats o' the broken halves of bigger ones juttin' up from the shore with all their ribs showin'.

Tagrol and I were tired of sittin' in the bottom of a boat, so we ended up choosin' a cracked brigantine lyin' on her side for shelter. As soon as we did, evenin' started settin' in. The rest of the beach was too sodden to catch alight, and we gathered the driest wood we could find to stoke up a fire. We sang, told all the dirty jokes we could remember, and made fun of everyone who had stayed aboard our swayin' ship and who had to be hatin' life.

It might've sounded like we were havin' a ball, but half of the reason we were makin' a racket was to add noise to that empty shore. Tagrol, Yelkis, and I might have been headstrong and foolish, but we weren't _that_ unaffected by seein' all those ships with holes ripped in 'em. We knew were campin' on top of a ship graveyard put there by something. Anything to distract us was welcome. Tagrol sang louder the darker it got, and by the time midnight hit, he was wailin' his lungs out. Neither Yelkis o' I tried to stop him, either. Hearin' noise was a comfort.

Just as Tagrol hit the high note right in the middle of Friggin' in the Riggin's, there was a huge thump on the side of the boat that echoed through the whole thing, and a raspy voice right outside the back said '_Keelhaul my bones, it's coming.'_

To say Yelkis, Tagrol, and I almost flew out of our pelts was an understatement. We leaped up and clustered around the fire before we could hear another muckin' thing. There was another big thrum that echoed through the hull—not a footstep, but a thud, like something flopped forward with their whole body.

'_Hell spare my soul, help me,_' the voice said. '_Help me._' There was another flop, and not on the side of the boat, but further up it. The thing was goin' up the side of the hull.

By this point, all of us were cowerin' in the side and not sayin' a word. Maybe if it had sounded like one of our crewmates tryin' to play a trick on us, we would have. But that damned voice didn't sound like anything out of this world. It was wrong. It was barky and rough, and it couldn't say the words right; it couldn't _talk _right. It sounded like it was readin' what it said off a paper and had never heard a lick of common tongue in its life before. All of the cadence to what it was sayin' was wrong. It was the same as hearin' someone who's never sang before tryin' to sing the lines of a nursery rhyme to a funeral dirge.

'_Oh Vupuz, it's coming back,_' the voice said. '_Hide! Hide!_' And then it went quiet.

When it didn't speak again, and we realized it wasn't goin' to, we huddled on the opposite side of the brigantine. None of us were goin' to sing again, and with the thing on top of the ship, we weren't runnin' for the boat. In the end, we decided to take turns with watch and try to get some rest. Tagrol and I were the first to sleep with Yelkis on guard, but that didn't last long. We woke up in the middle of the night to Kelvis screamin' that awful scream foxes make like they're gettin' their tails shredded in a clothes wringer. Tagrol slammed his head against the side of the ship, I drew my cutlass so fast I almost puked, and Kelvis lay on the floor blabberin'.

"I saw it!" he shrilled. "I saw a white ghost's face with empty eye sockets peerin' through the door!"

There wasn't any more sleepin' after that. We stuck back-to-back with each other with our weapons drawn, and not one of us let down our guard. Then the fire started burnin' low. None of us wanted to go firewood gatherin' again, but we couldn't rip off any of the swollen boards on the brigantine. Kelvis was shakin' too bad to send out. Eventually Tagrol and I had a brief, ah, _discussion_ about who was goin' to make a run for the boat, and a few minutes later, I was outside with my cutlass, a makeshift torch from the fire, and makin' every last sign for wardin' off bad luck that I could remember.

I was halfway across that bilgehole of an empty ship beach and damnin' Tagrol's tail to the bottom of the ocean under my breath when I accidentally stepped over a drop. I fell and dropped my torch, sendin' it bouncing into the side of a huge hull. While I was tryin' to stand up and climb up the side of the hole a whole chorus of voices like the first spoke at once.

'_Ruuun!_' they said. '_Ruuuun! Not onboard on the ship, the other way, the other way! Ruuun!_'

I screamed loud enough to blow my lungs out, Tagrol and Kelvis started a racket before Tagrol charged out wavin' his saber with a sobbin' Kelvis behind him, the rotten wood beneath me snapped, and I fell down the hole and landed on top of a mass of fuzzy and fat rocks. There was a quiet oomph, and a huge brown face turned around to look at me with eyes as big around as my paws.

'_Everyone is gone,_' it said.

It blinked sleepily.

As it turns out, once we got the mess sorted and all of us stopped screamin' and wavin' around our weapons, we realized we weren't the only ones on the island. It was covered in Vupuz-damned harbor seals. The isle was a place for them to rest, along with their pups, who hadn't lost their white fur yet. We hadn't spotted any of them since they swam to the shore from the rocky part of sea the lookout had seen. Since it was evenin', most of them had turned in.

When nightfall came, the seals perched all over the cliffs and flopped up on the sides of the boats to take naps. All of the lumps some of the crew had spotted further off weren't warped wood; it was a group of seals lyin' all over a hull. Tagrol's singin' had woken a whole host of them up from another boat. They couldn't speak any common tongue except from what they heard the crashed sailors sayin', so to try and tell us to shut up, they just mimicked what bits of language they'd heard. They didn't understand what it meant.

In fact, once we found the one beast on our ship who could speak some sealtongue and rolled his sorry sick tail out onto the island, they turned out to be cheerier company than most of the crew. They hung around the rest of the mornin' it took to repair us sails, sittin' on the rocks o' paddlin' around with their bellies and whiskery faces turned up before they dived. And after that, they swam out with us as we left the island of hulls as fast as possible, because while whatever put those ships there might've liked seals, I sure as Hellgates think it wouldn't have liked us.

So there's your story for the evenin'. And if ye want to hear another, well, I think my tankard is gettin' a bit low on rum, and I'd like to hear you tell me a better tale first. An encounter with a bunch of harpin' seals and an isle of tipped ships is worth that."

* * *

**A.N. Have I returned? No, I have not. But I thought I'd pass by with a brief chunk of stupid fun. This is a piece of original that was too close to its Redwall roots to resist, so after some editing, here it is. A few you may recognize a certain corsair rat who's dropped in to say hello. There's a small chance I might write a few more oneshots concerning the Drunken And Utterly True Tales Of Laikan The Corsair And Those They Concern, but I wouldn't keep your eyes peeled for that for a while.**

**Good luck with writing, and adieu,**

**-Minkspit**


	2. Chapter 2: Interlude

My name's Harran, this handsome ferret sittin' to the right of me is Jigal- thanks, matey; I think I'm pretty good lookin' for a fox myself- and this story may or may not have taken place a long ago. But really, it doesn't matter; in a place like Wenketh, it would have played out the same way no matter what year or season it occurred in.

Wenketh was one of those little towns clinging to the edge of a forest, a bundle of cobble-street-joined homes in the wilderness. It was situated on the top of a hill that had a small creek wrapped around it, and they poked at the stream now and then for trade. No hordes came after them, because they knew there was nothing of worth to steal, and none of the Skipper's holts came to crack knuckles at the vermin or side eye 'em, because there was no _point_ to it. Wenketh was so damn sleepy the vermin and woodlanders in it forgot that they were supposed to be quarrelin', or that their kind quarreled at all.

They might've even forgotten they were different species if you'd have let them get a bit sleepier, I think, because it already took a few bleary blinks and a shake of a leg or two to remind 'em who was mouse and squirrel and who was stoat and rat, but then their eyes would glaze over with small-town talk again, and they'd go right back to being as sleepy as before and tuck themselves under Wenketh's spell again. Travelers came in and travelers came out, but everyone born in Wenketh who journeyed away always came back, whether it took one day or thirty seasons. Everyone knew everybody and nothin' about them. There were no ghosts in Wenketh, you understand—there were hauntings on the hill by the trice-removed mouse baker's cousin who was put to death by the curse of the ancient fox gypsy who lived two streets from the town center.

Jigal and I were coming down from the Open Lands at that point, and we'd been travelin' for a long time. We were trying to get to a quarry, and since neither of us wanted to cut through the Northern Mountains or run into angry woodlanders or the like, we followed the river. We spotted Wenketh between the trees just as afternoon fell, and we thought it would be a good place to spend the night. It was that or camping curled around the bottom of a pine tree and trying not to look like crow bait, and with that lovely second choice, we headed off for Wenketh without a second thought.

When we got into town, Wenketh was a chattering mess with every window thrown open and beasts leaning out their doors between their baking and clothes mending. Beasts were laughing and drinking, and at the same time, a lurchy funeral dirge was coming out of a cheap tavern's windows, and two beasts were hauling off a pine coffin down the street.

As it was, Jigal and I had got there right in time for the funeral of the year. Old beast Hulluk—the town drunkard—had finally upped and died. He was a spiteful ferret who'd had more drinks in his lifetime than heartbeats or good thoughts, and his son, Ferrick, was a shot out of the same bottle. They had found Hulluk inside the old ale brewer's basement leaning against a barrel where he'd snuck in to steal some drink before his heart exploded, presumably due to a combination of pickled blood and ill will.

No one had seen Ferrick for two years before his father kicked the bucket, but there was some whispering that Hulluk had killed him. They were father and son as much as Swartt and Veil and avoided each other like the plague during daylight hours, but they begrudgingly admired each other's tolerance for alcohol. They went drinkin' together near nightly up until the point when Ferrick disappeared. Half of the villagers said Hulluk had probably killed his son for finding another drinking buddy when Ferrick discovered he didn't need his father for that, either, and probably killed his drinkin' buddy too. Hulluk didn't say a thing about his disappeared ward. But Wenketh had plenty to say about him.

"Now that the old scumball's dead," a greying shrew brewer said, who looked like he knew something about age, "everyone here gets ale free out of the barrel for the day—Hulluk whined in life about my awful ale, but seeing they caught him keeled over by a barrel of it, I'd say he would've been my best customer if he'd have ever bothered to pay. Everyone give a toast to old ferret!" The crowd roared.

The shrew ordered his huge brewery basement to be opened up and rolled a giant keg out of the shadows, everyone cheered and began getting drunk—because that's what everyone does when they have any excuse to get drunk—and Jigal and I joined right in. The mayor of Wenketh ordered a holiday for the night, toasts went up and inhibitions went down, hours passed, and then Jigal and I woke up face-down at noon on the attic floor of a boarding tavern with a mob outside the door wanting to impale our hearts on a stick.

Apparently, during the night, Jigal and I ended up going to bed with two of the mayor's progeny. He caught wind of it from somewhere, and he was overjoyed to discover a couple of handsome rouges from nowhere had been snuck into his house by his offspring and then had some fun with said offspring before jumping out the windows.

* * *

"The oldest daughter made him mad," Jigal said, rubbing the back of his head, "but I think it was the son that tipped the scale." Harran the fox paused in his tale to assess his ferret companion. Around them, their audience got comfortable, opening more flasks or nibbling on more pieces of the tavern's bread. Harran spun his piece of scone.

"They were barely younger than were we and they were more sober," Harran said as Jigal dipped his muzzle into his tankard. "They both knew what sayin' yes meant, but I think the mayor still believed they should be sleepin' in cradles, even if they'd have to fold in half to get their spines to fit in there. But at any rate-"

* * *

-there was angry mob poundin' on the tavern door, and the cowerin' vole owner was already fumblin' to get the door open and let them in.

"The Mayor will buy a barrel of ale and enough food for a season for the beast that comes out with that fox or that ferret on the end of their pitchforks!" someone yelled, and crowd surged forward and banged up against the tavern walls.

Both Jigal and I leapt up, scrambling for our haversacks and cloaks with dizzy heads, and we could hear the roar of the mob downstairs as they poured in through the door and started overturning tables. We were up the attic meant for storing straw, and the only thing between us and the half-drunk, blade-hoisting horde below was a sheet of wood below our feet not as thick as my finger and piles of hay. There was an open hole in the floor for the attic ladder, and there was no way to close that entrance. We could already see shadows darting around beneath it.

Then we saw it: the hole below the ceiling rafters that had sunshine leaking through it.

Someone started coming up the ladder just as we spotted it, and that made up our minds then and there. Jigal and I rushed for the wall. He threw me up, and I caught the edge and pulled myself up through the hole, over the eaves, and onto the thatched roof. Jigal was halfway out the hole when I heard someone shout and footsteps pounding across the floor. I didn't stop to hear their good morning. I pulled Jigal onto the roof, and both of us took off down the side of it.

Our feet slid down the slick thatch, but we jumped off the roof just as we were a paw's breadth away from stepping on nothing but air, and we landed on the roof of the next house. The cottages were close enough to have nothing but thin alleys separating them that we could have stepped across, and we jumped from one rooftop to another across the town as yelling followed behind us.

But we couldn't roof-skip forever. There was nowhere to hide up there, and Jigal and I stuck out on the dull brown and golden roofs like blood in snow. We were desperately looking for a place to hide before we shed any of the blood we stuck out like when we saw the crest of a giant wheel sticking up from behind one house, a wooden sun on the horizon. We ran for it, cleared the last few houses between us and the stilled waterwheel, and jumped on its paddles.

I went first and landed on the top with my feet on the edge of a paddle. The wheel hung still for a moment before it slowly turned, the ground and the dry streambed came rushing up at me, and I jumped off as my paddle rolled beneath the wheel. A sliver of darkness from two crooked cellar doors that hadn't been closed well stared up at me further up the bank. Jigal hit the wheel next, and the instant he landed, I grabbed his paw and dragged him towards the cellar. We wormed between the heavy doors, Jigal carefully closed them behind us with only a crack of sunlight left, and we went bounding down a flight of stone steps.

We were just in time. The next thing we heard through the cellar doors was muffled yelling and tromping feet down the alley as they tried to find us. When they didn't root us out there, they headed onto another alley. A drunken party isn't complete without a bit of violence and skewering innocent bystanders for charges that don't deserve skewering, and since Wenketh was determined to be a good hostess, Jigal and I decided to lay low for a while. We crept down the stone stairs to explore the rest of the cellar. The stone floor got cooler beneath our feet, bands of wooden supports arched above us, and then we came out into the main room and saw the ale barrels. We were in the brewer's basement.

There were no stacks of barrels. There were towering walls. Barrels that were bigger around than a small badger lined the sides of the cellar. The middle of the room was taken up by a wooden ramp meant for guiding the giant barrels down to the entrance door, which folded outwards onto the street, and one giant barrel was still loaded up there with only a coarse net and the pull of a lever holding it back. Every other inch of the floor was a labyrinth of kegs that smelt of ale, fruit, vodka, and each shade of alcohol in between. It would take years to identify every one, and even more stretched out in another wing of the cellar. On the furthest wall, there was a shelf of flour bags, beans, dried sedge ropes, and ground meal—the family's food larder.

It was a good place to hide as Jigal and I waited for the villagers to stop their scrambling about. We spent our time investigating the barrels and guessing what kind of ale lay inside each. We tried sips from a few, but it never went further than that; we already had one angry mob after us from the last time we got drunk, and we didn't need to gather another. But Jigal and I underestimated how excited the villagers were to have something to chase. Two hours later, we could still hear yelling when we crept up to the cellar door crack. By the time evening began to roll around and the crack of sunlight dimmed, the distant shouts hadn't faded.

It looked like we were going to be trapped in the cellar for the night. Seeing the pantry in the corner, there would be a good chance one of the brewer's family would have to come down to get supplies for dinner. We could easily hide from them behind all the barrels, but we were still stuck in Wenketh, and nightfall encroached.

And that was when we came with a plan.

It didn't take much to pull open one of the flour sacks and coat Jigal in it or for him to do the same to me. We dribbled some red wine and jam around our mouths and we hid our cloaks in our supply sacks. That done, we climbed up the ramp to the barrel loaded at the top. I put my dagger to work on the ropes too thick for Jigal's rapier, he grabbed the lever, and we both prayed to Vupuz that the barrel and doors were as strong as they looked. The last bit of ropes fell. Jigal pulled the lever.

With a groan of wood, the barrel rolled down the ramp, and it hit the doors with a resounding _crash._ They almost buckled outwards. The house shuddered down to its foundation. The shrew brewer's whole family must have been deaf not to hear that noise.

"What was that?" someone from outside said. Jigal and I scrambled aboard the barrel as we heard a crowd outside the cellar.

"Ooo_oohhhh_," I said. Jigal echoed me with a lower groan.

The crowd outside was interested now. Someone tapped the door.

"Is—is someone in there?" they said. The doors were starting to buckle outwards.

"Let me out," Jigal rasped. "Damn it… Hulluk… you old mucker, let us out."

You could hear the beast outside the door swallow his heart.

"What?"

"Let us out," I moaned, the doors finished buckling, and we rolled out.

Jigal and I had to duck flat against the barrel to keep the low entrance from sweeping us off, but the instant were outside, we straightened up and started running backwards to keep ourselves from falling. The groove in the ground in a few feet front of us—meant to catch barrels and keep them from bouncing away—apparently wasn't meant to catch a barrel that had two beasts running on top of it. With a bump, we skipped over the groove, spun, and the drunk crowd screamed as the barrel turned and rolled right down the middle of the street.

The entire time Jigal and I were wailing and groaning about being let out. We both spat as many curses as we could think of on old Hulluk, especially Jigal, who'd lowered his voice to a deep, scratchy tenor. To all the half-drunk beasts in Wenketh we looked like wraiths spat out of Hellgates. We kept rolling, no one could stop us, and by the time we'd almost reached the end of the town, half of the beasts were sobbing in the street and begging Ferrick to crawl back into his grave.

"Your father's dead, Ferrick!" one hedgehog said, her shawl askew and face drowning in tears. "Go join him in the grave!"

"I don't have a grave," Jigal said. "Not after what he did to me."

The town's side gate was coming up and there was no way it was going to withstand a collision with the barrel. We were so close to getting out, but the villagers who weren't falling on their knees and making enough ward signs to tie their fingers in knots were still clustered close to the barrel, and we couldn't make a run for it with them that close. But then one stern-faced fox opened his mouth.

"Spirits!" he yelled, brandishing a walking stick with the head carved full of vine designs. "You are no longer welcome here! What must we do to pass you on?"

Jigal turned his head to look at him. Flour specks were flying off his neck the whole time, jam and wine trickled down from the corners of his mouth in a caked mass, and he said something neither I nor the entirety of Wenketh are going to forget for the rest of our lives.

"I can't leave," he said, "until you find the ale barrel my body is in."

Everyone on the street almost had a coronary. Some mouse screamed, the hedgehog from earlier swooned, and the barrel hit the side gate at full velocity. Wood splintered beneath it. Parts of the gate went flying and the huge ale barrel went flying down the hill with us on it. Halfway down the hill, our legs couldn't keep up anymore. We bounced against the hard surface of the barrel with our limbs stretched every which way, and before we could get sucked under it and made into marrow pancake, it crashed into a tree. A sea of ale burst down the hill.

The wave of blackberry brew carried Jigal and I down another five feet before we bounced, barrel hoops and tumbling wood slats following, and we hit the stream at the bottom. Water washed over us. It stripped away the flour as ale burned our eyes. We coughed up water as we sat up, and we were both dazed and had splinters, bruises, and flour in places we didn't know existed, but it didn't take long for us to run when we heard the Wenketh villagers gathering their lanterns and weapons to come down the hill. Thankfully, the stream kept us from leaving footprints behind, and we headed down the road as fast as possible. They couldn't have caught us if their tails were on fire and they were rolling down on their own ale barrels.

And that's why, if you go to Wenketh for a celebration at any time of the year, they always poke around the bottom of their barrels with a staff before they break them open for a drink."

* * *

"Don't bring up the whole 'my body is in your barrels' quote again," Jigal said, protesting over the howling laughter around them. "I told you I have no idea why I said that."

Harran laughed and raised his fist towards Jigal. The ferret snorted, but there was a smile on his face as he lightly knocked knuckles with Harran. Afterwards, the fox leaned against his side.

"Well, you're damn good at whatever you do," Harran said, "whether it's singin' a ballad o' convincin' a whole village your pickled shell is floating around their vodka. But I've always known that."

"You're fantastic at pullin' off the impossible yourself, fox," Jigal said. "Are you sure you don't have nine lives hidden away somewhere? I thought that was for cats, but with you, I am not sure."

"Well, matey, you'll have to stick around more to find out," Harran said, his eyes shining. He turned to the crowd and raised his tankard up. "Alright, who's ready for another story?"

The tavern roared.

* * *

**A.N: Well, no corsairs, but two more familiar faces for a few people, and another original short turned Redwall for a Valentine's Day present. Because nothing says "romance" like implying there's a pickled corpse at the bottom of your rum. (Hey, romance is Freya Thorine's turf, not mine! ;P) No blatant shipping, but if you put on Shipping Goggles, you might be able to see it; whatever floats yer boat. Happy Valentine's Day, guys! -M.S**


End file.
